The Water Drive

Is data storage going liquid? Professor Irving Epstein and other Brandeis University researchers found that when certain chemical reactions take place in a water-in-oil microemulsion, patterns can be stored and later recovered. Under an intermediate level of light intensity, the image (a smiley face, in this experiment) was maintained for more than an hour before beginning to fade.

In the PC realm, if you could maintain this system of reactions and address its nanodroplets individually, you could theoretically store a lot of information in a tiny space. But before you trade in your hard drive for a jar of salad dressing, keep in mind that such technology is a long way off. "You could, in principle, build a reaction-diffusion-based computer," Epstein says, "but you'd have a hard time trying to persuade investors that it would be competitive with silicon systems."

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